“It’s just a reading app”
— how is this still an unsolved problem?
Twitter Has Held Talks to Acquire Flipboard
Kara Swisher, recode.net
Those discussions, which have been pushed by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, have been taking place since the beginning of the year, said sources, as the social communications giant has faced increasing pressure from Wall Street to grow its audience and innovate its products. But despite a flurry of activity more recently, sources said these talks between Twitter and Flipboard — who are partners on a number of different fronts — seem to be currently stalled.
Still, the concept behind the acquisition are intriguing on all kinds of levels. For Twitter, it would bring an experienced product team — headed by well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue — to the company.
It makes sense to me; Facebook has Instant Articles, and Flipboard gives Twitter a path to something similar, whether in Flipboard’s app or its own. (Just as acquiring Push Pop begat Facebook’s Paper app and Paper begat Instant Articles.)
But the very fact that Instant Articles has any traction as a design and delivery solution, beyond just trying to maximize eyeballs — this suggests that trying to create a good, generalized reading experience is becoming awfully close to a universal problem. Just as mobile and social were and are universal problems.
Here is an incomplete list of reading apps on my phone right now (pretty sure I actually deleted a few holdovers between these older tweets and today):
- NYT Now
- Kindle
- Circa
- Nuzzel
- Medium
- This
- Longform
- Paper
- Digg
This doesn’t count stuff I have but keep stuffed away in a folder (like Nook and iBooks), stuff that isn’t built for reading but where I wind up doing most of it anyways (like Facebook and Tweetbot), books-disguised-as-apps like How to Cook Everything, multimedia apps that are theoretically for video but I mostly use for reading (ESPN), stuff that I know about but don’t keep on my phone (Buzzfeed’s app, others), stuff that nobody on the planet wants (Apple Newsstand), etc.
And I don’t even have an RSS reader of any kind on my phone any more, which 2010 Tim would not have believed for a second.
Yes, mobile, social, and video have complicated the media landscape. Not a little but a lot. We’ve tried and learned very many things — and each complication suggests new approaches, sometimes working against the grain of what’s come before. But the fact that we are still more or less stuck at zero when it comes to giving people natural, delightful, generalizable ways to discover, read, and share stuff in 2015 is laughable. 2010 Tim and his friends are laughing at us. And they look fucking beautiful, because they’re five years younger, haven’t been through the crap that we have, and solving this problem seems obvious to them.
I need something to show for these wrinkles around my eyes. If we’re going to be starting from scratch anyways, I’d rather be five years younger too.
PS: In a note, Irwin Chen, who’s as smart about digital reading as anyone, disagrees that we’re stuck at zero: “I think the baseline default has been raised as a result of the demand for all the in-progress attempts you cite above. Responsive design is a thing now. There is now consensus that type should be readable, leaded properly, and we should use fonts optimized for the screen. To me, that’s moving the needle past zero.” He’s right, of course — but I still feel like we’ve lost as much as we’ve gained.
